The Governance Report You Don't Have to Build Yourself

TL;DR

Before building a custom reporting dashboard, check what’s already there: the weekly digest in Managed Environments emails usage numbers, inactive apps and flows, and the most-used resources and top makers, every week, with no dashboard project required. It’s off by default per environment, only goes to Power Platform and Dynamics 365 administrators unless you add more recipients, and doesn’t work in sovereign clouds — but for most tenants, turning it on is a five-minute settings change that replaces a genuine chunk of what a governance reporting project sets out to build.

What’s actually in it

The digest has three parts. First, a usage summary: how many apps were used and how many active users there were across managed environments in the past month. Second, a list of apps and flows that haven’t been launched in a while — if one has never been launched at all, the “Last launch” column simply reads “None,” which is as direct a signal as governance data gets. Third, the most popular apps and flows by session and run count, plus the top makers ranked by total sessions across everything they own. None of this requires a Power BI report, a data export, or a CoE Starter Kit deployment — it’s generated and delivered automatically once the setting is on.

Turning it on

Enable tenant-level analytics first — usage insights depend on it and won’t populate without it. Then, per managed environment: Power Platform admin center → Manage → Environments → select the environment → Edit Managed Environments → under Usage insights, select Include insights for this environment in the weekly email digest. This is set per environment, not once for the whole tenant — an environment you forget to include is an environment with no weekly visibility at all, silently.

Who actually gets it, and how to widen that

By default, the digest goes to everyone holding the Power Platform administrator or Dynamics 365 service administrator role — not to environment owners, not to makers, not to whoever actually cares about a specific app’s adoption. Add more recipients through the same Usage insights settings, or via PowerShell:

$tenantSettings = Get-TenantSettings
($tenantSettings.powerPlatform.governance) | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name additionalAdminDigestEmailRecipients -Value 'name@contoso.com;other@contoso.com'
Set-TenantSettings -RequestBody $tenantSettings

The mailbox isn’t the habit

Getting the digest delivered is the easy part — the actual governance habit is what happens after it lands. An app that’s shown “None” under Last launch for three digests running isn’t a data point, it’s a decision waiting to be made: archive it, reassign it, or confirm it’s intentionally dormant. If a CoE Starter Kit is already deployed, its Power BI dashboard and inactivity notification process cover more ground (bulk permission updates, maker surveys, ROI tracking) — but the weekly digest doesn’t require any of that to already exist, which is exactly why it’s worth turning on regardless.

Who this matters to

• Admins/CoE: turn on the weekly digest for every managed environment individually rather than assuming a tenant-wide default — it’s opt-in per environment, so a partial rollout creates exactly the blind spot in whichever environment nobody remembered.
• Leadership/Business: two of this digest’s own numbers — active users and inactive resources — already are the honest, recurring report a governance dashboard project sets out to build; that project doesn’t have to happen before measurement starts, since this already measures it.
• Makers: an app the digest shows with “None” under Last launch is doing the same job, reputationally, as no app at all, just less visibly — review your own resources before someone else’s report does it for you.